On 07/11/2013 07:53 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
What's your definition of what people perceive Fedora to be?
"What do we talk about when we talk about Fedora?" :)

Well, we just did a major release. Go look on news.google.com for
"Fedora 19", or search for "Fedora 19 review", or just poke through a
few popular tech sites and forums.

What do people do when they want to 'try Fedora 19'? They download the
primary image on the download page, which is the desktop live, and run
it. This is what they've _always_ done.

Do you ever see anyone doing a minimal install and commenting on the
package loadout? Commenting on the actual interesting and difficult
technical changes that are what a distribution really does? No, they run
the live image for a couple of days, decide whether they think the
desktop background looks nice, say whether they liked the installer, and
bash GNOME 3 for a while.

If we're really, really lucky they'll mention there are some other spins
available. In passing. Without ever downloading one. And that's about
it.


That's presentation issue no more no less.

Instead of actually providing our sub-communities with their own 3rd level domain under fedoraproject.org ( <sub-community>.fedoraproject.org ) which each include news,presentation download button for their release. We decide to belittle every sub-communites work and present only one.

> Regardless of peoples perception or what you think they are there
> still would be products however we QA would take care of the installer
> + base/core os bits and sub-communities that build upon that base/core
> OS like Gnome takes care of QA their own spins. 
> 
> Who better are to QA their own spin then the people that a) use it b)
> create it c) release it?
People who want to do QA? I mean, that's why we have a QA team. You've
been around longer than I have, but so far as I recall, the QA team has
always been about doing more than simply testing the core OS.

That's news to me anything else you want to share from the past which actually does not align with what got discussed and done in that era of "Just do it".

We always have been focusing on the installer and core components which is the primary function of QA as in to provide an installable and well working base os for others to build upon.

You yourself know that the installer is the nr.1 cause for slippage and resource consumption from the QA community but if you rather want to play desktop testing instead of focusing on the things that actually matters to everyone in the community like the installer which install the components and allows users to use that desktop fine that's your choice.


I must also confess to a personal interest here: if I'm expected to
spend the rest of my professional life doing nothing but testing the
goddamn installer I think I'll quit and start a yak farm. Is that really
what you want us to do forever and ever amen? Apart from anything else,
I find it *interesting* and *useful* to work on desktop testing...

I have absolutely no idea what RH expects of you or wants you to do you as part of your job but if you want to click through Gnome instead of Anaconda it is fine and nobody is saying you should not do that just join their community and help them.

If you want to change profession and start your own yak farm go ahead do it but that's just something you have to make up with yourself.

JBG